Why Growth Marketing Is Different
"It's not enough to focus on one element of your funnel for growth marketing. It's about taking a view of your customer's complete journey and applying those insights to generate compounding returns that lead to more engaged consumers." - Matt Bilotti, Drift.
You've probably heard of growth marketing already; it’s not the new kid on the marketing block anymore, but many still misunderstand it. Let’s explore what it is, why it’s different from ‘traditional’ marketing, and why it’s pivotal to the success of every great marketing strategy.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is a type of marketing approach that focuses on constant advertising experimentation, and data analysis to attract, engage and retain new customers. Growth marketers use data to build targeted ads based on your user’s unique preferences, and then will optimise the ad messaging, design or targeting continually to increase growth, fast.
What Makes Growth Marketing different?
Unlike traditional marketing, which focuses mainly on the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU), growth marketing is concerned with engaging people across all funnel stages. Growth marketing agencies, like Growthcurve, use their expertise to optimise the whole AAARRR funnel aka the ‘Six Stages of Growth’:
- Awareness - how many people know about you and your services?
- Acquisition - how many online visitors can a lead magnet bring into your funnel?
- Activation - how successfully do you nurture your leads to get them ready to convert?
- Revenue - what percentage of leads do you turn into customers?
- Retention - how can you keep customers by reducing churn, upselling, and stopping them from leaving?
- Referrals - how do you utilise your current customer experience to affect Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, and Revenue?
Features of Growth Marketing
There are some defining features of a growth strategy that distinguish it from other marketing techniques, primarily:
- Constant experimentation
Using several channels and techniques, then confirming the results. If a method works, it’s fully optimised and applied at a large scale; then it goes back through the optimisation cycle. - Multivariate testing methods
Growth marketing also examines your customer’s shifting wants and needs to provide customised content. Using multivariate testing, growth marketers can easily enhance conversion rates by iterating messages at each funnel phase. Growthcurve's London growth marketing team assesses content connected with each target category before creating tailored campaigns across multiple channels - personalisation has been shown to reduce acquisition costs by half. - Customer retention
Customer acquisition isn't the only purpose of growth marketing. It's also about building a devoted and engaged consumer base that always values what your company has to offer. Loyalty results in a lower churn rate, and a higher customer retention rate naturally results in extra income. - Long-lasting relationship
Growth marketing aims to solidify long-term connections with clients beyond persuading them to buy something. It focuses on increasing user engagement and retention and gives value in unique ways that foster genuine relationships.
What’s the difference between Growth Marketing and Growth Hacking?
- Growth marketing and growth hacking are used to describe the process of promoting any product. Both, however, serve different purposes.
- Growth hacking focuses on achieving rapid short-term growth through acquisition, whereas growth marketing focuses on long-term sustainable growth through various techniques.
- Growth marketing uses data to improve overall business growth plans alongside ad campaign optimisation, whereas growth hacking uses data purely to experiment and refine campaign results.
- Growth hacking focuses on corporate goals, whereas growth marketing focuses on consumer pain points.
What is the main difference between Growth marketing and performance marketing?
All marketing is essentially boiled down to increasing growth and performance. When marketers think about growth, they instantly associate it with strong metric performance and corporate expansion. So, what's the difference between ‘growth marketing’ and ‘performance marketing’? Let's find out:
- All about impressions, clicks, and leads
In contrast to growth marketing, there is little emphasis on activation, revenue, retention, and referrals. Performance marketing is all about impressions, clicks, and leads. - A one-and-done system
It's also a one-and-done strategy. Ads will generate results if you have the funds to keep them running. However, when the budget ends and the campaign is disabled, your ad will no longer be visible. This is why performance marketing is suitable for short specific-outcome campaigns. Performance marketing is most effective at the bottom of the funnel, but growth marketing uses performance across all funnel phases to help accelerate growth.
What Is Growth Marketing - Conclusion
Growth marketing is a systematic approach to business growth that focuses on building an engaged and active audience to reduce churn and increase the lifetime value of individual users. Growth marketing is not about producing a ‘flash in the pan’ campaign. It will deliver long term results, for long term steady and accumulating growth. One thing is quite clear, growth marketing is the future of advertising. A well thought-out growth marketing plan can help marketers identify what ad techniques are and aren’t working using real-time data. For the past five years, Growthcurve has helped both startups and industry-leading giants to get unrivaled business accelerating and long-term revenue generating results.
